Wednesday, June 12, 2013

A regime so "leftist", it hosts the most right-wing man in Britain

Within hours of the savage butchery of a British soldier by a British citizen in Woolwich, East London, three weeks ago today, a hundred or so portly football enthusiasts congregated outside a local pub, costumed in balaclavas and England flags, to bellow semi-coherently about the demerits of “the Muslim scum” as well as to attack the very police force that had apprehended and arrested the soldier’s loathsome murderers.

The leader of these fine exemplars of contemporary British culture, who goes by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, is habitually denounced for his craven, limp-wristed moderation by Nicholas Griffin, the British National Party leader, Holocaust denier, and Member of the European Parliament who has been spending quality time this week in Damascus as the guest of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Granted, says Griffin, Robinson may be perfectly sound on the question of the evil (or should that be ‘The Innocence’?) of Muslims. But he hopelessly fails to grasp the utter subservience of Downing Street to the machinations of global Jewry (euphemized by Griffin in public, though not in private, as “Zionism”).

Which is by no means all the man has in common with Hezbollah. Griffin’s is the instinctive bigotry of the parochial white reactionary, whose revulsion for foreigners is proportionate to the “alienness” of their appearance. Since Lebanese Shiites have shorter beards than Syrian Sunnis (and Assad doesn’t have one at all!), he’s cast his lot with the former, whom he said via Twitter were “doing [a] better job than the [London police] dealing with ‘British’ Jihadi cut-throats.” That Hezbollah fighters are themselves jihadists is evidently of scant concern – like the Israeli military establishment before him, Griffin has concluded that some ‘terrorists’ are more terrorist than others.

Surprised though some may have been to see the leader of Britain’s ultra-right shaking hands with the prime minister of a regime better known for befriending George Galloway, the contradiction only exists if you imagine Assad and his gargoyles were remotely “leftist” in the first place. From the first day of the uprising, Assad’s policy has been one of maximum violence, deliberately targeting the men, women and children of the Sunni majority sect. A seasoned hatemonger and thug like Griffin ought to feel right at home.